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Good points, although there is the odd production that takes place outside of course. In terms of the ALEXA Mini LF not being worth much to the industry in 10 years, I'm not so sure. The real push in the industry for more than 2.5K (2K after debayering) is the move to VFX where more resolution is useful, but we reach the limits of human vision (for normal viewing situations anyway) around 2K, so the 6K capture for VFX to deliver in 4K should be fine as long as human vision doesn't radically improve. The 'gotcha' with that statement though is alternative formats, like VR, which are viewed by the eye at a much wider FOV and therefore require a lot more resolution in the area being viewed to keep the same FOV for each pixel. This is the current limit of 360 cameras - they sound great at 4K but when you punch in to view a 90degree FOV (roughly a 24mm lens) then you're now looking at a 1K image. So yeah, if we're strapping two cameras back to back with fisheye lenses then you'd be wanting that UMP12K rather than a 4K camera for sure. Of course, you'll also want deep DOF and the image planes to be as close together as possible (or you'll want three cameras 120 degrees apart) and so this leads to a very different case where the cinema camera form-factor is no longer the one you'd prefer, going in favour of the 'eye on a stick' form factor.

There may be a third factor at play, although it would be invisible to film-makers. That would be where clients have a keen sense of what the image they want looks like, and they learn that all the examples of the shows they like were shot on the Alexa, so they just know to ask for that. Sure, they wouldn't know what the letters "DR" are as an acronym, and they wouldn't know what "Dynamic Range" means as a pairing of two words, but they might know what it looks like. One example of that is how women have more refined perception of colour than men, meaning they see clearer than men do, but mostly won't know the technical terms. Most of the people I run into in real life that have a honed sense of taste / aesthetic such as visual artists, interior designers, etc have very astute perception but lack the technical vocabulary to explain it.

For a 2s shot, yeah, use a GoPro, or someones phone for that matter. Absolutely. Reliability is critical when you have so much at stake. The cost of running a real set is many/tens/hundreds thousands of dollars an hour. Ironically, once again it's something other than image quality coming into the picture. This time I can understand, but when it's marketing, or the extra pixels that aren't really that visible, then it's a source of greater frustration 🙂

Nice work, that's a convincing film grade with the lens aberrations, the grain, the unstabilised motion, and the colours pushed to that level of saturation. Also, totally normal behaviour for people just chilling in the park lol.

This is my problem. Whichever pocket I check, it's in the other one. With it being so hard to find it's practically like I don't even own one at all! 🙄🙄🙄

It's not even 4K. I mean hellooooooo... 2012 called and wants it's camera back!

What a great video! Cool song and nice skating, it's like a California groove video but in a slightly different direction. The image is really nice too. I don't look at it and think it's lacking, which seems to happen with less and less cameras as time goes on 🙂

The C500ii gets 13.1 stops, also not that far behind: https://www.cined.com/canon-c500-markii-lab-test-dynamic-range-latitude-rolling-shutter/ Of course, combined with the Alexas colour science and that incredible latitude, the total package is really something else. Perhaps the biggest challenge in the camera market is that each camera that has a significant strength is marred by being absolutely terrible in four other ways. It's rare for a camera to be the best, or even in the top-tier, in every category. Although I suppose that the Alexa has its share of flaws - size, weight, and price being a few that quickly come to mind!

I should also add that we almost never see Alexa footage that hasn't been shot with hit-end glass, and hasn't been professionally lit, directed, and colour graded. The RAW footage I have seen often shares some of the tendencies that other cameras have, like the notorious green tint that it's famous for with colourists, but that you never see in final footage.

No offence meant, nor taken 🙂 I just find the current camera market to be rather odd. It seems to be that people assess cameras based on size, cost, and resolution rather than image quality. To me, the BMMCC has an image that is, let's say, 80% of an Alexa Classic (maybe it's less, but let's go with that as a point of comparison). Compared to the BMPCC at 80%, the GoPro has an image, let's say, 20% of an Alexa Classic due to its poor DR, brittle codec, garish colour science, and fixed lens. To put that in context, I think perhaps no camera under the $1K retail price of the Micro gets over, maybe, 50% of an Alexa Classic, maybe less. So that said, if the BMMCC was $3K and the size of an FS5 no-one would compare it to anything other than cinema cameras. I just find it odd that people judge every camera based on specifications, except the Alexa which gets a pass because it looks so glorious, but then the BMMCC and the OG BMPCC somehow don't qualify for being judged on image quality and get classified as small, cheap, 1080p only relics, when the image should speak for itself. Or maybe the GoPro look is the future and I'm just lingering in denial. Although that doesn't explain why the cheapest functioning Alexa Classic is still more expensive second-hand than a brand new Komodo, Canon R5, Zcam E2-F6, Canon C70, etc.

I don't think it does. I own a BMMCC and wanted to buy an all-in-one RAW 1080p camera and narrowed it down to the EOS-M and the OG BMPCC (P2K). I binge watched Zeeks channel, which shows off the camera really well, but the impression I got from the EOS-M footage is that it has low-DR and clips hard, just like the Canon video modes that most Canon cameras have. Despite the EOS-M shooting a higher resolution and being half the cost, I went with the P2K.

How does the DR compare between them? If you're shooting RAW at lower ISOs then DR is one of the biggest contributors to IQ I find.

Cool to hear it's working for you. It makes me laugh that you say Sony have improved their colour science a lot since the A7III. The A7III was much improved compared to the ones before, and those were much improved compared to the ones before that, and the ones before that.....

It would be nice if a YouTuber knew how to use a dictionary.... Unless Smallrig somehow found out that he was doing something nefarious....? Like not using a dictionary 😉

Here's my subjective opinion... NO. 🙂 Relating this back to the subject of the thread, I couldn't possibly think of a better example of why the BMMCC still matters, because the GoPro is perhaps the best example of what is wrong with modern cameras - it has more pixels than the BMMCC but looks worse in every way, even in an unfair situation such as being put on a 4K timeline. The BMMCC matters because it has a nicer image than almost all of the current cameras, regardless of resolution and including cameras many times the purchase price. The fact that a GoPro is a real competitor for the form factor is laughable. The BMMCC intercuts with an Alexa without much trouble or issue, but studios create contractual clauses specifying the maximum length and number of shots that a GoPro can be used for on real productions. There couldn't be a more stark comparison than that surely!

I bought a P2K (OG BMPCC) purely because it had a screen. The M2K (BMMCC) is tiny, and some lenses are tiny, but once you add a monitor it instantly becomes the size of a 1DC or larger. They did make a 4K version, it was called the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/blackmagicmicrostudiocamera4k It has a group of loyal fans, but it truly is a studio camera and doesn't perform well outside of studio conditions, plus it's discontinued and there aren't many out there in the wild so is hard to get hold of. It will be interesting to see what happens to GoPro, both the camera line and also the company. The camera line seems to be a YT mainstay as it's a tiny camera that with its wide fixed-focus lens and excellent in-camera stabilisation is perfect for vlogging on the go, but the image quality is always a disappointment with DR issues / plastic colours outside and bad ISO noise and drab colours inside. Many YT channels were built on a single GoPro, often used without any accessories whatsoever, just literally holding the camera between thumb and finger and relying on the stabilisation to work magic, or putting it on a shelf or on top of a bottle as a temporary tripod to do a talk-to-camera section. I'm not sure what pressure there is for BM to update the Micro, but maybe there is with increasing VFX prevalence.

It's been about a decade since the GoPro Hero 3 camera was released. Over that time, GoPro have released cameras that are roughly the same size, weight, battery life, price, and target market, but of course the specs got better, so they're a good benchmark to set a benchmark for the pace of technological progress. Here's a comparison of the data rates over that time... The Hero 3 Black (2012) could do 4K15 (124MP/s) and the Hero 6 Black (2017) could do 4K60 (500MP/s), a 4X increase over 5 years, or a 32% increase per year. Therefore, we can either expect a 32% reduction in size and weight per year to keep the same performance, or we get that in a performance bump each year. Taking the BMMCC, released in 2015, and extrapolating it to today would mean we could expect a camera with 7X the throughput, which if we round it up to an 8X increase would be full uncompressed RAW at 4K120, 2.7K240, or 1080p480... at the same size, weight, and battery life. I don't really think I need a camera that can do 4K120 or 2.7K240, but one that could do 2.7K60 and 1080p120 and was 66% of its current height and width and depth and 25% the weight, well, that would be something to have!! Not only would that be spectacular for drone users, but also great for those who are using these as crash cams, dash cams, and other tight-installation applications.

Are there any other cinema cameras you could fly on a drone this size?

and had 24p support for many years IIRC

Beautiful! Well done on filming the bees like this - I've tried and it's no easy task. Also, don't apologise for posting your own stuff, assuming it's relevant to the conversation.. It separates you from the people here who don't shoot anything and just talk about film-making without actually doing it 🙂

Would that might make an 8K workflow achievable without a super computer? I saw comments from the YT crowd that they couldn't edit the RAW files from the R5 even with their $30K+ Mac Pro computers. Does anyone here even own an R5?

Both you and @elgabogomez have said that it looks like both @tupp and I have valid points and that we're trolling each other, and it's a fascinating thing. The more I think about this test, and the points that Tupp has raised and what is wrong with them, the more I realise that this test is kind of the holy grail because it involves almost every technical aspect in video, every workflow aspect, and every perceptual aspect. In fact, not only do you have to understand those, but you have to have an underlying understanding of what is actually going on behind those things. For example, there's the bayer sensor and debayering (and other sensors like X-Trans), there's colour subsampling, and there's image rescaling. If you don't understand these concepts then you can't have this conversation at all, but knowing how to talk about each of them in isolation isn't adequate either. These are all discussed in isolation in film-making, with each of them kind of talked about as being in a different place in the pipeline and for a different purpose, and the definitions of these may not give any clues that they are related, but they are. In fact, they are almost identical. They are simply different applications of the same mathematics, applied in slightly different ways. The fact that the whole image pipeline is being discussed, and in the context of resolution, means that you cannot truly understand the signal path from end to end unless you understand that these all have the same underlying mechanism. This is something I tried to explain, but it's points like this that don't fare well in a conversation where 27 things are all being discussed simultaneously. I think this is a problem that the world is experiencing in many forms - the discussion of things that are very technical and people have vested interests in. Take the example of the age of the earth. Science says that it's a few billion years old. People can react to that information in one of two ways. They can believe the scientists and just take that on face value, or they can question how this incredibly large number was derived (and they have every right to do so and being skeptical is a good thing). The problem comes when the scientists talk about carbon dating, and very quickly we find that almost no-one can wrap their head around the dozens of concepts, methods, processes and even ways of thinking that are required to understand every concept that the analysis that calculates the number is built upon, unless they have a scientific background to begin with. So the conversation goes off in 100 directions (like this thread did) and it ends with either the person believing the scientists on face value (after having seen a lot more information) or the person decides that the scientists are just baffling them with BS and they "go back to believing whatever they want to believe". A funny thing about science is that the deeper you go, it gradually splits into quantum physics and philosophy, both of which end with basically no evidence that we exist at all. There is no "bedrock" of fundamental truth, regardless of how far you dig, so ultimately it comes down to a judgement call that everyone makes. The problem then remains, how do you determine truth about a topic where the summary isn't deemed trustworthy and the analysis is too long / complex for people to understand? I think this is a problem that we haven't really found an answer for yet. Anyway, coming back to this thread, I'm happy that I understand what's going on here, I've seen enough mis-understandings on Tupp part to see where he's going beyond the limits of his technical knowledge, and I'm also backed up by Yedlin, whose writings and demos are (apart from one person posting in this thread) widely respected across the industry.

The FX9 and VENICE are FF aren't they? If you're 6K FF then you can be 4K crop, but if you're larger than FF then 6K won't cut it, which is where the 65 is. I agree about the "identical" pixel size, thus my comments about why they might choose this for colour performance. The more I see what happens in the real world, the more I realise this "Netflix demands 4K" is really not a limitation, or at least not if you have a good team. I see an incredible amount of content on Netflix that was purchased from people who shot on sub-4K cameras, and even some of the feature films that Netflix commissioned weren't shot on 4K cameras. I think it's a "rule" on paper only, and if your content is good then they'll do the deal and make the money. As was mentioned above, Canon cameras are often used for doc work, which is often shot outside in uncontrolled conditions, sometimes in a situation where they are just capturing things and not controlling them. In this situation you will expose for your subject, splitting the exposure between the sun and shadow skin tones, and when they run to a position in-between you and the sun, it helps to not have the entire sky (or half the sky) as digital white. However, as you say, the top cine cameras have quite a lot of DR, so it shouldn't be a big deal if you're using those cameras anyway.

Which also means that you can have two sets of key accessories (like batteries and media) which can act as backups between the cameras, and some accessories (like lenses) don't need to be duplicated and can be shared across both cameras. This is a big deal - I'd suggest @seanzzxx that you price up the options taking into account all the batteries, chargers, rigging, media, lenses, and all the rest of the stuff that you would need, and then look at each piece and see what you would do if each piece failed, then buy extras so that the camera bodies are the only single points of failure. With two different cameras there are likely to be lots of single points of failure where they would take a camera out of operation so you end up with almost 4 sets of stuff, but do that for having two of the same camera and you can eliminate a lot of that. Plus the extra weight of carrying things around, plus the extra complexity and time spent looking for the accessory from X camera when you've already found that accessory for Y camera but they're not compatible, etc.

Doing the maths, the Alexa 65 would have needed to be 8.7K to have a 4K S35 crop, but an 8K sensor would have a 3.7K S35 crop which would probably have been just fine, so I guess 8K looks like the magic number at that sensor size. What's interesting is that the Alexa 65 has 120 pixels per mm horizontally, the 3.4K is also 120pp/mm and the 2.8K is 118pp/mm, so I wonder if they've decided that the pixels need to be at least that big? Certainly, ARRI are aware that having good pixels is more important than having lots of pixels, so they may have done testing and drawn a line at a certain pixel size as being the minimum required for a certain image quality / noise / colour performance. Of course that won't stop other manufacturers cramming as many pixels into their cameras as possible. Every time I see a manufacturer declaring victory with their latest release full of tiny little pixels I think of a salesman in full-tilt sales mode for All-You-Can-Eat Gravel. Sure, it's gravel, which isn't good to eat at all..... but it's ALL YOU CAN EAT so STEP RIGHT UP!!! *sigh*